Monday, November 16, 2009

Excerpted from my daily feeds this from the folks at make use of dot com

Internet radio has become a popular entertainment source especially
for music and podcast-like talk shows. I have found a great application
that allows you to listen to Internet radio on the move without
shelling out for an expensive smart phone.

VirtualRadio is an application for Java enabled cell phones which
allows the user to listen to Internet radio stations on their cell
phone. The app uses the GPRS internet connection available on almost
all cell phones to download the audio at a rate of 32kb/s. The audio
quality is very high and music is crisp and uninterrupted.

There are loads of different channels to choose from and categories
(called groups) to browse through channels which interest you such as
‘Music’ and ‘Politics’.

The app is completely free to download and use, although GPRS costs apply and vary depending on your network.

Friday, November 6, 2009

For
years we’ve been told the key to the future is the Open Web. And for
years it’s been true that taking the open path eventually pays off. You
can’t deny the power of open technologies to disrupt the incumbents,
whether they are operating systems or carriers or the media in general.
Arguing about what constitutes open can be entertaining, but in a world
where realtime dominates, we are starting to move on to capture the
value of open for ourselves, in the private Web.

As social media clouds become more resilient, we are trusting them
more. Twitter lists are a robust signal that the company has moved from
keeping up to encoding the value of its network. We won’t see many new
stars as lists proliferate, but rather a better sense of how to model
the new media forms that micromessages enable. Boiled down to vertical
niches, lists are the instantiation of a way of looking at the Web, a
kind of Yahoo 2.0 based on people aggregation rather than sites or
topics.

But what value do these lists have in raw form? It feels like a
Wikipedia page, where you learn not to click on hyperlinked words for
fear of getting lost in ever-cascading tangents based on ever-more
generic topics. Instead, you rely on the intelligence of whoever
constructed the page, scanning for clues as to authority, serendipity,
social characteristics worth capturing for yourself. Two problems: the
list architecture is splayed all over the place, and we have no tools
for harvesting the value.

Of course, we’re just seconds away from the onslaught of third party
takes on the subject. Surely we’ll see interesting aggregations of the
Top 100, the best, brightest, sexiest, etc. We’ll recognize the
familiar names and ratify their positions in the new marketplace. It’s
a marketplace that will have its own hierarchy, its own Oprah, its own
politicians, police, and underworld. And with all that will emerge its
own underground economy.

What is the Private Web? It’s the private place only we know about
(or think we do.) It’s the place where our deepest fears and instincts
combine to produce the hunches that drive our lives. As a parent of a
teenager, I’ve seen my hunches evolve to reflect the rapid pace of
social media and my daughter’s use of it. Twitter is nowhere on her
radar, Facebook serves as a gas station where she pauses for fill ups,
and video chat and IM are interrupted only for food, homework, and
periodic audiences for the purpose of fundraising for road trips.

All of the most important parts of her life are conducted on the
Private Web. This is not a good or a bad thing; it’s just what it is. I
can sense her world but only by inference — more by the difficulty in
understanding parts of it than any rational tool such as asking
questions or withholding permission until information is volunteered. I
feel like Steve Wonder, blind but with some heightened power of
perception that slowly carves out information from the resiliency of
the difficulty of it.

Take this exchange:

When are you going out?

In a bit.

[some narrowing to an hour, say 4]

Who are you meeting?

Uhh, Amy and mumble and whatever. [co-conspirator, someone I don't
know, and no mention of whoever I want to know about, usually boys]

So when will you be coming home?

I don’t know I’ve done my homework [usually not] and it’s [whatever
day it is] and I just want to have fun with my friends, Dad. Jeez.
[Obfuscation of the length of the excursion to allow for audibles at
the line of scrimmage to do all the stuff I should be concerned about]

Lengthy negotiation based on the hunches I’ve collected.

What’s important to understand is that my daughter already knows
exactly what she wants to do and has modeled it to the best of her
ability to predict the future, online and through the social media
framework. Facebook tells her where the opportunities lie, texting
confirms or augments those clues, voice is only used to ratify plans
once the permission map has been drwan and pre-tested for potential
disruption. These kids are really good at this stuff, and we are
learning more from them than they from us.

Some conclusions gleaned from observations of the Private Web:

It’s not about Twitter, it’s about what Twitter has triggered.

Realtime is the best way to get what you want, before defensive measures can be deployed.

Friends are important, and particularly a deep bench. If one friend becomes overexposed, you switch to a backup.

Texting is the prime channel, then video, followed distantly by email and IM.

To unpack, last in first out. Texting is tied to a hard coded
identity, credit card, device. This provides two-way leverage, where
the parent (boss) can monitor and require timely feedback, while the
child (you) can meter out pseudo-information to keep you happy while
navigating largely unseen on the digital network. It is much easier to
project a sense of action, reliability, and strategic positioning via
social media when you can downplay the value of moving physically
through space and time. Foursquare will hit a wall once adults
(companies) discover the existence of these breadcrumbs. Foursquare
will counter by virtualizing location.

Just as location will become more editorially enhanced, so too will
the role of the team in social hierarchies. It’s much more useful to
have interchangeable friends or partners, so that the parent (company)
knows there will be some coherent continuity regardless of conditions
on the ground. People profess to value collaboration, but the strongest
connections in the social graph are between groups of overlapping
friends who in aggregate add up to a rational team but don’t require
hardcoded roles. Put in nightcrawling terms, it’s “OK, I helped you out
last night, tonight you’re my wingman.”

Realtime, of course, just plain wins. You may get away with almost a
few times, but once people are onto you, they’ll start serving the ball
to the weakest point. Realtime is inexorable because our sense of
timing adapts to each generation of realtime and soon gets frustrated
with how slow it is. How many times have you interrupted someone’s
argument because you know what they’re going to say? How many times
have you skimmed a post or even a tweet for some clue that it’s worth
whatever miniscule time you’re now tuned to? That’s why video is right
there after texting, because a picture is still worth a thousand words.
“If looks could kill…”

And first but not least, Twitter is so not the point but what it has
created is. The key to the Private Web is notification, not the actual
content. The social signals that enable or disable connections are the
new PageRank. It’s not a link but the ability to see the metadata that
describes a link’s immediate value that’s valuable. My daughter uses
speed to get off the phone or out of range before I can pin her down
for the next number to reach her at. The data is sitting there in plain
sight but where it is is obscured. Understanding her social graph in
realtime is what we want to know and what she wants to obscure.

The Private Web operates on deeper emotions and instincts than we
are accustomed to acknowledging. Where do I want to go? Who do I want
to be? In the case of my daughter, how do I get to be who I want to be?
The keys to the Private Web are shared, not at a location but via
implicit and dynamic permissions to access the stream in realtime.
Those who signal their understanding of this deeper value pool will
implicitly advertise their value, and encourage us to request
permission to share with them. Those deeper conversations will contain
higher value as we trust those who share them to keep them private to
the group who values them.

Twitter may not support conversations very well, but it provides
clues to where the Private Web exists. These conversations live in the
cracks between the public stream and direct messages, hidden either by
obscurity or purpose. As they become more useful, the tendency will be
to make them public, but in doing so they will lose that unique quality
of trust and value. Instead, these private conversations will grow,
until everyone is participating.

Music & Free tool to burn cd/dvd

Dancing Bear on $1.00 bill

my soundcloud dropbox widget

JPA's cyberspot

My parents met at Cal in 1942, our family has called the Bay Area home ever since. In 1975, halfway through the 6th grade, I was uprooted from Burlingame and spent Jr.High in Jakarta, Indonesia. I did my undergraduate course work at UCSD in La Jolla where I completed a double major in Comparative Politics and Histories of the Americas. Oliver North and the CIA managed to shatter the foundations of the Latin America desk at the State Department so rather than enter the foreign service I started temping at a law firm as a legal assistant in 1986 . After a dozen or so years as a Sr. Legal Assistant I headed the staff for the technology litigation group at Cooley Godward in Palo Alto. On Independence Day 1988 5 partners 3 secretaries and my paralegal squad bid farewell to the big firm womb. I remain extremely proud of my role as a founding member of a start-up boutique IP law firm, Day Casebeer, LLP. I was fortunate to have outstanding client work in the Life Sciences/Biotech sector on behalf of Amgen, Applied Bio Systems, Genentech, Alza and ICOS. On the EE side I headed the discovery battle for SUN in the JAVA litigation against Microsoft as well as the antitrust actions that followed the browser wars. After 22 years as a paralegal administrator, trial support specialist and the master chief of bet the company no holds barred patent litigation, I resigned in 2007 to address the care of my elderly parents.